So I've got a fairly complex puppet I'm working with. There are Right Quarter, Right Profile, Left Quarter, and Left Profile head positions with 3 cycle layers between each different position of the head, as well angry/worried brows (also with cycle layers) mouths, etc. When I set my triggers for the sad mouth, I used the 'M' key for the sad mouth on each head position (RQ, RP, LQ, LP, and the intervening cycle layers). Now when I recorded, alternating between the happy (default) mouth and the sad mouth, it created a sad-mouth track in my timeline for every head position (17 different sad-mouth tracks), even though I hadn't turned the character's head. Editing all those different mouth tracks in the timeline is becoming a pain, and the problem gets much worse when I add eyebrows and actual head turns.

Is there a way to make it only create tracks for the head position that you're in at the time you trigger the mouth? I.e. to trigger just the mouth/eyebrow that corresponds to the head position?

Do you define lots of triggers mapped to the same key? Or one trigger that is mapped to lots of layers? I am guessing the former. That is, in the triggers panel you see lots of triggers with the ‘M’ key bound to each one. If I am correct, you can instead have one ‘M’ key trigger defined that is bound to each of the layers instead. I think you then would get one trigger recording instead of one per trigger definition.

I bind one key onto multiple layers when doing eyes, but don’t see lots of tracks like you describe. Have a look at the screen shots in this blog when talking about expressions for eyes (e.g. ‘a’ for angry eyes). https://extra-ordinary.tv/2018/04/21/debugging-character-animator-eyess/ - in particular, this is what I mean. See how Angry is bound to multiple layers at the same time? Is this what you have? Or do you have lots of different triggers with one layer each?